Mailbag #178

/

Weren't you looking for a memorized deck a few years back? Did you end up deciding on one or did you bail on that idea? I'm trying to decide if it's worth the time investment. —TC

A little bit of both, actually. A couple years ago I memorized Mnemonica and I tried working with it for a few months but I ended up giving up on it. Not because it was too difficult, but it just didn't fit in with my philosophy on magic that was developing at that time—the Carefree Philosophy.

While I think it's a powerful tool for the professional performer, I feel it's more limiting for the amateur.

  1. The deck can't be borrowed.

  2. The deck can't be shuffled by the participant—or even just handled casually.

  3. You're limited in the tricks you can do without affecting the stack.

  4. A lot of stacked deck tricks feel very similar to me.

  5. Improvisation is constrained.

Many would argue with that last point. They'd say that a memorized deck opens up a world of improvisation. "Jazzing" they call it. Because, I guess—like jazz—it's frequently terrible.

Jazzing is primarily about locating named cards in the deck. I think magicians may overestimate the entertainment value/impossibility of locating cards in a deck no one else is allowed to shuffle.

When I say "improvisation is constrained," I mean in the sense that if you want to maintain your stack, you're limited to stack tricks. And in my experience, there tends to be a few great tricks you'll want to do… and then a bunch of other tricks you can do with a stack but that you wouldn't bother doing otherwise.

The Carefree Approach is: Let's borrow a deck, have it shuffled, and still have a library of dozens of tricks I'd want to do in that situation—and pick the right one for the vibe, their interests, etc.

When I was carrying around a memorized deck, my feeling was, "Well, might as well use this weapon given that I have it with me." And since I was going to use it, I might as well do one of the few great tricks rather than the many just "decent" tricks.

So for me it was more limiting than freeing.

I still run through the deck in my head once a week to keep it fresh. And I still have a deck stacked with my collection of decks, should I ever want to use it on the spur of the moment when I'm home. But it didn't end up being a tool that was far and away worth the effort. If you think it would be a fun exercise to memorize a deck, go for it. But I think it actually opens fewer performance doors than you'd imagine.

I feel you don’t write too much about billet switches. Do you have a go-to switch you use or a billet trick you use regularly? —CC

I don’t do a ton of billet work, so I don’t have a big arsenal of billet switches. My go-to switch is a tabled switch: Billet folded in quarters on the table. Billet to be switched in in finger-palm. In the process of picking up the billet and handing it to someone, you lap the tabled billet and bring the other one into play.

My favorite use for this switch is at dinner at a larger table. You get everyone’s attention, write something on a business card, fold it up, set the pencil down, then announce yoou’re going to play a game of word association. You whisper a word into the ear of the person to your left, they choose a word it makes them think of and and they whisper that word into the ear of the person on their left, and so on. The final person reveals what word they’re thinking of.

You have a pre-folded and unfolded billet in your lap with a small pencil and here’s wher you do the dirty work. You have everyone state their word out loud, so now we see how the word evolved around the table. As this happens, you’re writing the final word in your lap and refolding the billet with on hand. Then you do the switch as you pick the billet up.

I hold the billet up and askwho the most “trustworthy” person in the goup is and then pass it to them.



Dustings #148

/

Okay everyone, I appreciate you thinking of me when you see things like this, but you can stop writing me.

Yes, I know David Penn has a trick out called Digital Penetration.

I already made a joke about it four months ago.

If there’s a low-hanging joke about finger-blasting, you can be quite certain I’ve already gotten to it.

Well, magic’s greatest mind is at it again. Here’s a new genius routine I’ve come up with for you.

Next time you’re hanging out with someone and they’re like, “What should we do tonight?” You casually suggest: “Hmmm, we could go to the P3 Magic Theater [Penguin’s theater in Columbus Ohio] or we could maybe just stay in and watch the Matthew Leblanc baseball-playing-monkey movie, Ed.”

It’s even better if you can subtly influence your friend to name these two options (Using NLP, Wonder Words, etc.)

Either way, you then tell them: “I’ll let you pick, But I already know what you’re going to choose. In fact, I have a sticker that predicts it right here.” You bring out a small envelope with “Prediction” written on it.

Allow them to choose and give them a chance to change their mind.

Whatever they choose, slide your prediction from the envelope showing a bang-on prediction and nothing else in the envelope.

Peel the back off the sticker and stick it to your forehead. This will remind people of the incredible feat you just achieved. And it will cement the orientation of the sticker in place so no one will notice the brilliant deception Penguin built into their logo all those years ago. (Not that anyone is likely to spot it unless they’re like a real smart doctor or something.)

Hmmmm….

Out of Humanity

/

In Joshua Quinn’s new book, he has an entire chapter on tricks with Cards Against Humanity cards.

That reminded me of a post I had planned that had slipped my mind. It’s an Out of This World effect with CAH cards. Joshua has a similar idea in the book where the spectator is able to separate the awful cards from the wholesome ones.

That’s good but I think I like the twist in this version better. It comes from everyone’s favorite darling of the magic community, Rick Lax.

Here’s his email to me from a few years ago…

Out Of This World using Cards Against Humanity cards, and we're asking the spectator to 'sense' the cards and, without looking, determine if a card is "Something you feel bad about" or "Something you feel good about." Then you first read the cards that the person felt bad about, and they're all commonly bad things like, "Racism" or "Crony Capitalism." And then you read the cards with "Things you feel good about" and they're just the most vile cards in the game.

In the 1.0 version, all the 'good feeling' cards were related to men's genitals, but the writing on some of these cards is just so good--maybe better than the trick--that really it's just an excuse to read the funniest cards against humanity cards.

Specifically, I came up with OOTW for CAH cards. Justin came up with the groups "Something you feel bad about" and "Something you feel bad about." Or maybe it was "Things that give you a bad feeling/Things that give you a good feeling" Either way, his wording was what made it good, and allows for the 'control' part where you show the 'bad' things and it looks like things are 'on track.'

I like it. Methodologically, I would use something like the 242 Poker Deal as a way to have them separated. (Use the technique on page 9 of Issue 40 of the Love Letters newsletter for the final card.) They’d only be separating 10 cards that way, but I think that’s enough for the bit to land.

I like this approach because of the misdirect involved. You start by introducing them to CAH cards (if they’re not familiar) and then you lay out the premise as you want them to understand it.

“Most of the cards have something weird, unpleasant, or disgusting on them. But every now and then you’ll get a kind of sweet card. Like this one for Puppies! or Breaking out into song and dance. [You pull out some cards from the box to show these things, but theyr’e not the cards you’re using for trick.] I’ve got a mix of cards here and I want to see if you can pick up on the energy of cards that give you a bad feeling and cards that give you a good feeling.”

So, they assume the idea is they’re going to separate good from bad.

But I think a lot of people will get ahead of you and guess that they’re going to end up with the bad cards.

Then at the end, when you turn over the cards they didn’t choose to keep and they are in fact “bad” things, that will cause them to shift their mindset back. Oh, I DID separate out the bad ones.

But as per Rick’s idea, these cards should all be abstract, institutional, or vaguely political "bad" things that sound serious but aren't shocking or vile:

Voter Fraud
Corporate America
Toxic Masculinity

etc.

And maybe one or two trivial ones like, “A disappointing salad.”

You congratulate them for separating out all these bad things.

“And the ones you had a good feeling about are…?”

You have them turn over their cards and it’s very cock-centric or memorable gross or vile.

Carrying my poop around in a ziplock bag.
Using a Smucker’s Uncrustable™ as a maxi pad.
Holding down a child and farting all over him.
Twisting my cock and balls into a balloon poodle.

And then you’re like, “WTF? You preferred these to a bad salad? Weird.”

The Asymmetry of Fooling

/

This is a concept I thought was well known, but it's come up a few times this past year, so maybe it's not as understood as I thought.

It's in regards to what we consider an effect that fools people.

"That would never fool anyone," says Bob.

"What are you talking about?" says Steve. "I showed it to many well-known magicians and mentalists at a magic convention and everyone was fooled by it."

Is Steve lying? Maybe.

But let's assume he's not. Let's assume he showed it around at a magic convention and all the magicians said they were fooled.

Probably some are lying. That's how these things work.

But again, let's assume no one is lying. Not Steve and not the people at the magic convention he performed for.

If magicians were fooled by this trick, then simple logic tells us laypeople will feel fooled too.

But logic fails us here.

Here's the thing you have to understand…

If a magician understands 95% of what you did but can't quite figure out that last 5%, he will often say, "I was fooled."

If a non-magician catches on to just 5% of what you did, they will often say, "I wasn't fooled." They know enough to know it wasn’t really impossible.

So “it fooled a room full of magicians” may tell you almost nothing about whether the trick will fool an audience. Fooling magicians and fooling laypeople are not different degrees of the same achievement. They are different tests.

Keep that in mind the next time someone is like, “But it fooled everyone at WizardFest!” That may not be the best metric to know if it’s going to awe the people in your life.

The magician focuses on what he can't figure out.

The non-magician focuses on what they can.

Note: Denis Behr has sent along this quote from Strong Magic by Darwin Ortiz which makes the identical point in one sentence:

"An interesting difference between performing for magicians and performing for laypeople is that, if a magician succeeds in figuring out ninety percent of a trick but can't figure out the other ten percent, he will feel that the trick fooled him; if a layperson succeeds in figuring out ten percent of a trick but can't figure out the other ninety percent of the trick, he will feel that it didn't fool him."

There you go. There’s no reason to be suckered by the marketing of how many magicians were fooled by something when “fooled” for them frequently means, “I didn’t catch one small aspect of the method.”

If a smart guy like Darwin Ortiz, and a dumb guy like me can reach the same conclusion, you can be pretty sure the idea has merit.

Monkey Shines Logic

/

I really liked your Obsession post and the idea of simplifying your presentations, but I do wonder… how? I don't want to just say "This is magic!" But coming up with a more believable explanation seems to require a fairly complicated backstory in most cases. Any tips or workarounds for this?—CC

I think the problem you're running into is one of trying to come up with a "believable explanation." You don't need a believable explanation.

The other day I was watching the movie Monkey Shines from 1988.

That movie features a monkey that has been experimented on to have hyper-intelligence.

Do you know how that monkey gained this power?

Well, some guy took a frozen human brain, sliced off some pieces of it, boiled them up to make a serum, and injected it into the monkey. And now the monkey is smart!

Because that's how it works, right? Intelligence and cognition don't emerge from the highly specific architecture of neural circuits, synaptic connections, and ongoing activity in a living brain. It comes from some transferable chemical essence you can puree and shoot into another animal.

No, of course not. But this logic works perfectly fine for a movie. And it works fine for a magic trick as well.

Traditionally, magicians offer no logic for their trick.

"Why is this magic thing happening? Because it's magic!"

In an attempt to deepen the experience, they'll often try to make it more believable and try to create a literal logic for the premise. Sometimes this works. But frequently it gets convoluted or it ends up diminishing the impact of the effect considerably.

I think the most powerful premises have a story logic to them. That is, they are coherent without being credible. These are the ones that have the best potential to create a feeling of magic. The premises are unreal but not arbitrary.

So don’t look for a dissertation. Just find the story logic concept that’s going set up the rest of the effect. The world is filled with these: rituals, wishes, cursed games, luck, animal omens, contracts with. fate, elixirs, spirit contact, dreams, deja vu, and on and on and on.

No Logic: Gives us a story of a monkey that is super intelligent with no hint as to why. It's just unmotivated.

Literal Logic: Gets us bogged down in the science and biology of why the monkey is so smart. It's confusing or dull and gets in the way of the reason we're here: to experience horror and thrills.

Story Logic: The monkey is smart because he got shot up with frozen brain slurry. Great! It gets the job done. Makes sense. Establishes the premise in a coherent albeit ridiculous way. Now we can get on to the good stuff.


Mailbag #177

/

This is gross, right?

Like, is it just me, or is this kinda crazy? Like a true breach in privacy for spectators!

Like, I feel it’s creepy to be looking at your audience purely as data points for revealing information, rather than, um… as HUMAN FUCKING BEINGS?

I don’t want Terminator vision while trying to truly connect with my audience.

How is this NOT gonna look like staring off into space/reading text while performing?

Have we lost the plot? Max Maven once said that there’s all these new electronic gizmos that GET information, but no one asking “Ok, you have the information, now what do you DO with it?”

Curious your thoughts on this….? Am I being too harsh? Do I just ‘not get it’?—XX

Yeah, I think you’re probably being too harsh. Although I'm not the best person to judge this. I don't perform professional mentalism where these things might be used.

My common-sense, amateur perspective is that this is not really the solution people think it is.

You know how you'll see a mentalism show and the performer will have people look in his ears to make sure there's no secret transmission devices?

They do that because it's BEYOND OBVIOUS that electronic devices could be used to help accomplish their feats. It's something so obvious to laypeople that we go out of the way to cancel that thought in their minds.

Well, now what are they going to think when you're wearing your questionable dorky glasses on stage?

The guy selling this has an answer on his site…

Sybil Sight runs today on the Even Realities G2: magnesium and titanium, 36 grams, clear untinted lenses in your prescription or none, no camera, no LEDs. […] People who recognize smart glasses see a familiar consumer product and dismiss it.

This strikes me as kind of naive.

An engaged audience has their suspicion up about everything. They're going to dismiss your smart glasses because they're familiar with them?

"Oh, I know those glasses. They have a private micro-LED display only he can see and Bluetooth-connected AI. Nothing to worry about. He must have to read some small text."

Familiarity is only disarming when the familiar function is innocent. Here, the familiar function is privately feeding the wearer information.

It doesn't feel that far removed from saying:

This card trick uses a common Bicycle Svengali deck. People who recognize gimmicked decks see a familiar consumer product and dismiss it.

It also doesn’t help that, in certain lighting, people may see some weird shit shimmering across the lens of your glasses.

If anything, people who recognize them or suspect them as being smart glasses will probably think they're capable of more than they're actually doing—assuming there are cameras in them, facial recognition, etc.

I'm not morally opposed to this technology (or any technology) in magic. I just feel the deception here is awfully fragile. If one person in your audience has seen these glasses before, then everyone in their group will know you were wearing them, and then everyone in surrounding groups.

Then the danger isn’t merely that the audience correctly identifies how one piece of information was obtained. It’s that the glasses become a universal explanation for the entire performance.

It's probably notable that some of the first things I heard non-magicians talk about doing with AI smart glasses is walking around acting like they know the answer to every trivia question or acting like they could do complex math in their head. So I don't think using these for deceptive purposes is that far off anyone's radar.

While I'm sure people of a certain age will still be fooled by this, younger and/or tech savvy people won’t be as much. In fact, I think we're probably already at the point where the most forward-thinking magicians will be taking their glasses off before walking onstage—specifically to signal this type of trickery isn’t involved.

How the hell is anyone supposed to learn magic now? The paywalls are insane and everything is really decentralized. Where would you start if you had to start over or would you just pursue creative writing over magic? —CR

Hmm… I'm not sure I agree with your premise. Anyone who tried to learn magic pre-internet knows the feeling of checking out the same one or two books on magic from the local library for years.

The paywalls don't really keep new magicians from accessing anything they actually need to learn magic. A beginner in magic now has access to all the information they need for free. 1000x the information people had access to 30 years ago.

If anything, there's too much information. (Maybe that's what you meant by decentralized?) I think there's a benefit from having just one Genii magazine to keep you entertained for the month. Maybe you buy a couple of books each year and pore over them dozens of times each. Having to learn to make something work for you is more educational than just dismissing everything that doesn't immediately grab you.

Yes, I know how I sound.

Where would I start if I had to start over? The same place I started the first time.

I’d get Scarne on Card Tricks. I’d get the Karl Fulves books from Dover. I’d learn everything in them—and, more importantly, I’d actually perform them.

There are gems throughout those books, but you may have to do some work to make the material feel relevant and compelling to a modern audience. That work has an enormous payoff if your goal is to truly captivate people with magic.This will get you much further than spending those same hours working on sleights.

Until August...

/

This is the final post of July. Regular posting begins again Monday, August 3rd.

The next issue of Keepers will be sent Sunday the 2nd.

Regarding the emails and comments on Trident from this mailbag post, Reid Ferry has this response…

  • Hi everyone,

    First off I want to thank everyone who has supported Trident, it’s really blown me away. My #1 goal it to ensure people who pick up the project will be happy with their purchase. So with that said if you have any questions or concerns please reach out and I’ll be happy to help.

    There is so much more that goes into Trident then many people realize. I chose to be transparent and put out a live performance, knowing that some magicians would look at it and think they know how it’s done. And that’s fine, it doesn’t really bother me. It’s their loss and they’ll never be able to perform it. The neat thing about Trident is it’s one of the only propless mentalism pieces where the method is not only reliant on the script. There’s a system that goes on in the performers mind that cannot be backtracked from a live performance. 

    Now I do want to stress that I think the propless version is probably the least interesting thing that you can do with the system. While I chose to showcase the propless performance, you are buying a new mentalism system. I have clearly stated it is a system that can be performed propless if chosen, but can also do many other things. 

    Either way, Trident is extremely deceptive when performed correctly. Ive performed it hundreds of times, some of which was to some of the best mentalists in the world, and they had absolutely no clue how it was done. Of course you’ll pick up on some aspects of it when you watch it back several times on video but I’m sure people can appreciate the difference from a real performance. 

    Please feel free to reach out with any questions and I’d urge you to consider thoughts from people who have seen it.

In that same mailbag I wrote:

Any truly propless “any word” revelation has to be obvious almost by definition.

I received an email that asks:

I just don’t really get this- wouldn’t that apply to any prop based revelation? 

‘I wrote it down and now they know- option 1 they are magic. Option 2 they saw what I wrote down somehow, maybe sleight of hand or tech.’

It’s the convincers that make the difference, why would propless be different? Harder, yes! But different? Sleight of hand and tech etc have all been eliminated- crack this and it IS the holy grail.

Let’s break this down. Fooling magic requires a hidden deception: gimmicks, sleights, technology, incomprehensible mathematics, linguistic deception, etc.

The strength of these deceptions are what make a trick “not obvious.”

For example, if the spectator thinks, “He only could have known my word by looking at what I wrote down,” but you have deceptions in place to make it seem like you couldn’t have done that, then you have a non-obvious peek.

Now, if someone thinks of any word, and there are no props used or limitations on the word, then the only way for the magician to get that word is to get information out of the spectator. The information has to be enough to filter out 10s of thousands of other words to bring you within a few guesses. 

For that reason, the information used to figure out the word can’t be subtle. It may be clever and they may not see every leap in logic you make but they'll see the clues they've given you.

Remember, to fool someone, you need a deception.  When revealing a thought of word, that deception can hide in the props used: how they're gimmicked or how they're handled. Or that deception can be baked into the words the spectator is allowed to think of (e.g. anagrams or binary). But with propless, there are no props. And there is no deception that’s inherently within the set of "all possible words." So logic demands you must extract A FUCK TON OF INFORMATION in order to whittle it down.

This is why I said it’s obvious “by definition” because the limitations of the method require it to be. To reiterate, I’m talking about truly propless, and truly any word.

Solid advice from the team at Vanishing Inc. Don’t go bowling or get a meal with him either. You’re bound to end up wishing you were anywhere else.

Really enjoyed this photo triptych from Vanishing Inc. detailing the aesthetic evolution of magicians over the years:

  • First, the 19th-century gentleman-conjuror: The perfect tuxedo and the quiet confidence of classic sleight-of-hand.

  • Then, the 20th-century transition: Losing the jacket for that slightly casual, 'working parlor magician' look.

  • And finally, the prototypical 21st-century master: Backwards baseball cap, rolled sleeves, and just absolutely firehosing a jet of vomit-water into a bucket.

Truly, a golden age for the craft.

Catch you all back here next month. This is your yearly reminder we’re in the back half of summer now .If you haven’t visited an ice-cream stand, taken in a drive-in movie, gone to a baseball game, attended an outdoor concert, or hit the beach to enjoy the waves and the bodacious babes… get going. Summer 2026 on’t come around again. Now is the time to be out having fun and making memories. “Now” is always the time.